The Demon’s Brood: A Plantagenet History from Anjou to Bosworth

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This is a big ballsy history of the sort that is seldom written in these
nuanced days, and Seward reminds us of a style that has been all-but lost in
this thundering account of the Plantagenet family — from 999 when Count Fulk
burnt his young wife in her wedding dress, through 500 years to the man he
calls the “suicide king”, Richard III.

No crime was too gruesome for at least one of the Plantagenet family to
undertake, and no description too colourful for Seward to gleefully report.
As in the Christmas celebrations for Henry II: “A certain Roland le